


Coda

by Twitchiest



Series: Apocalypse Girl [4]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-08-17
Packaged: 2018-04-15 07:14:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4597650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twitchiest/pseuds/Twitchiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life and death are a balance.</p><p>Knowledge is life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coda

_**One**_  
  
The hardest part about making their own radio station is building the broadcast tower. They can take generators, and fuel. They're working on making their own.  
  
The tower takes a year and a half.  
  
It stands over a community of rough-built houses and farmland.  
  
When it's finished, they send out hope on radio waves. Not whispers of a place to go, no word of an untouched land, but instructions. Tapes they've recorded explaining how to make, grow, build.  
  
Knowledge kept secret is power, and power is control. So what, then, is knowledge shared, spread, given to all who will listen?  
  
_**Two**_  
  
The first traders who realise what they're doing beg for copies of the tapes.  
  
This is why she insisted they make many copies.  
  
"We have to build something new," she says, when she hands over the precious goods. "Or the world will burn again."  
  
They nod, clutching to a box that promises future. A future that will not make another woman like her.  
  
She smiles at them. "And here," she says, and her lover passes her a plant in a pot. "A gift. It eats flies."  
  
"What do you want?" the traders ask.  
  
"Nothing," she tells them. "Knowledge is life."  
  
_**Three**_  
  
She is.  
  
She roams the land, speaks to strangers, kills bandits and murderers. She doesn't act in anger. She has no anger left.  
  
She practices a smile that is, might be, kind.  
  
There is an overgrown country lane, tucked away. She cleared it whilst they built the broadcast tower, cutting back brambles and clearing young trees. It was abandoned long before the world burned. Now it is hers, a path cutting straight through the land.  
  
There is a town near the other end, on a hill so high you can see the city.  
  
She sits and looks at it, sometimes.  
  
_**Four**_  
  
Life and death are a balance.  
  
There was so much life before, and then so much death. Sometimes she thinks she was a tool to fix the balance. Sometimes she thinks that the person who burned the world can rebuild it.  
  
There are children, in the manor-house community. Babies, screaming and crying at the world. Life will be hard, for them. But it will be living, not survival.  
  
Twelve tells stories about them. About the prison. About the world they lived in, and the darknesses they ignored.  
  
She tends to her plants, and they thrive.  
  
She tends to the world.


End file.
